


Rescue Mission

by Rubber Chicken With A Keyboard (RCWAK)



Series: The Unknown, Post-Transcendence [2]
Category: Gravity Falls, Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Beast Wirt, Gen, tagging for violence just to be safe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:33:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28401720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RCWAK/pseuds/Rubber%20Chicken%20With%20A%20Keyboard
Summary: Some demon slayers make several mistakes, starting with "picking a fight with the one benevolent demon in the Eastern United States" and "pissing off Alcor the Dreambender", and descending from there.Or: a not-so-longfic emerges from WIP hell.
Series: The Unknown, Post-Transcendence [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/651320
Comments: 17
Kudos: 68





	1. Summons Unforseen

**Author's Note:**

> *punches out of the earth like a zombie from a grave* I LIVE
> 
> also: the zalgo text in this fic has translations! if you can't read it, just mouse over and the uncorrupted version should pop up as hovertext.

It was a mostly quiet morning in the Pines household. The click-clack of knitting needles marked the slow construction of a pair of small red mittens, their rhythm occasionally broken by a page of a book turning, or a demon unwrapping a hard candy. Somewhere out the window, a creature that might be charitably called a sheep floated past, untethered by trivial physical forces. 

An ordinary day, for a given value of “ordinary”.

Which, of course, was probably why it was interrupted as so many mornings were, with the frantic tug of a summons.

This wasn't an unusual event. Dipper saw summons large and small nearly daily as of late. His reputation had only grown since the Transcendence first hooked him up to Bill's legacy (which he was _not_ actually following, thank you very much, even if there were smaller parts to it he couldn't avoid), and Dipper had answered the increase in requests by figuring out as quickly as possible how to start ignoring them.

The tug came again, a little more urgent this time.

Dipper groaned and half-rolled off the air above the couch, gliding along the floor like an air hockey puck left idle. The summons lacked the strength of a proper blood sacrifice or even a well-drawn circle, but it carried the air of desperation common to most summons actually worth answering, and he didn't like to leave that kind hanging, even if it had fifty-fifty odds of ruining the rest of his morning. What if it was an orphan? A cult runaway? A cult runaway orphan? It wasn't even hypothetical, really! He'd dealt with all three.

“I've got a summons. Be right back,” he told Mabel and Henry, who both acknowledged him in their own ways without looking up -- Mabel with a nod, and Henry with a hum and another turn of the page. 

He let go, and let the draw of whatever sketchy circle and mediocre offering called him onwards do its work.

  
  


###

  
  


Dipper materialized into dark room -- someone's basement, he guessed -- mostly undecorated, full of storage boxes and gardening tools and whatever else the owner had never gotten around to cleaning out. The circle under his feet was drawn in sidewalk chalk on the bare floorboards, surrounded by half a dozen mismatched tea candles. The mingling floral scents from two on the left side stank vaguely like cheap perfume, but he held back from rejecting any deals out of pure spite just yet. 

A small bag of caramel hard candies lay at the center in offering. 

No occult (or just plain _cult_ ) paraphernalia, nor any creepy writing on the walls -- that was a good sign, probably. In absence of other obvious red flags, Dipper started the usual dramatic entrance speech routine, as always -- he rose up toward the ceiling, the billowing black smoke beneath him rolling out over the floorboards as he summoned gold-and-blue sparks between a snap of his fingers, and boomed out, “ _W̷̯͆͐̒̚ͅH̸̹̻̜͠O̷͈̾ ̵̛̐͆̈́Ḍ̴̨̺͉̩͗́̈́͠A̴̛̫̩̓̈́̎R̴̹̈́͠E̷̎̀̋̒̂̇S̸̮̎̎̇͊̀̕ Ṡ̴̛̛̏U̴̧͈̤̓͑̍M̵̨͇̞͂M̶͚̏O̶͉͂̀N̴͋͆͠ A̴͗͛̉̉̓̐L̶Č̵̦̫̺Ọ̵͙̤̲̳̥͊̚͘͜R̴̓͘ T̴͗̔H̶̦̑͛͠E̶ Ḑ̸̡̧̡͕͂R̶̟̾E̴͈͊͝A̴̝͈̳͛͑͊M̸͗̄͘BĔ̶͕͉̣̑̄͛̋̈́̕N̵͚̮̳̎͗̒D̷̗͙̈́̏̉̉̾̄E̸̕ͅR̵͋͂!?_ ”

A second passed without answer. And then: “Uhhhh, I d-do?”

Dipper looked down past the smoke to see a graying man in his sixties with a familiar croaking voice, sheltered halfway behind a box of Christmas ornaments, and he blinked, briefly speechless. Before him stood one of the last people he had ever expected a summons from.

“J̷͜aso̵̊ͣn Fu̶̖ndͩerbeͤ͞rke̬̜̓͠r,” Dipper said, a little off-balance now. “W̵h̵y̷,̸ e̸x̨͔͇̔͘a̜̹c̷t̴l̷y̴, h̷a̶v̶e y̴̶̥͆o̶u̵ ̵s̵um̴m̹̝̑o̵n̴e̷d m͔̤̫̉̒e̵?̴”

“It's-- it's about Wirt,” Jason told him, now pulling together the courage to look up at him. “He's in trouble.”

Dipper frowned. “Okay, n̡̂͆͜͠o̷̶͡rmḁ̸̓l̶͝ly I would totally be giving you the riot act right now about what an o̴b̶je̸c̸t̶iv̶el̵y̸ t̴̘͙͑͘ͅe̴͜͝r̷̈́ri̶bl̷̩̏̽̐̕e̶ i̵̓d̷̒eä̸ demon summoning is, but-- ̷in t̶ro̸ub̸le ȟ̶ͪŏ̴̺͞w?” 

He tried to feel around for an answer -- there were limits to what he could sense without _really_ working for it, but there was a gist of the situation there already. Slayers that had come into town, a plan gone horribly right. The Unknown's Keeper, missing. Some kind of fight. The slayers had taken up on the borders of the woods. _Wirt was still missing._

What?

Dipper shook his head, subtly trying to clear it. He was going to need the explanation after all, it seemed. This situation had way too much to unpack in just a few seconds of psychic research.

“It's a little long, b-but I'll explain,” said Jason. “It all started a few days ago...”

  
  


###

  
  


“... so, to recap: The Keeper is outside of the Unknown, there are demon-slayers trying to exorcise him, and you want me to help fix that.”

Jason nodded, a little less twitchy now that he'd had the chance to say his piece. Dipper ran through the facts as effectively as he could in his head, trying to work out the simplest solution.

In explaining, Jason had told him what he knew (which was fairly limited, but gave a good summary, if nothing else), and Dipper had let his powers fill in the gaps. Between the two of them, he had a pretty good sense of what had happened.

A company of up-and-coming demon-slayers looking to make a name for themselves had come into town earlier in the week, asking around about the woods. Interviewing the townsfolk and pulling up old missing child cases and hiker's horror stories, they'd generally tried to frame themselves as some kind of saviors, showing up to relieve the region of the terrible demon of the woods. From Jason's telling, they'd had mixed reactions on that from the actual townsfolk, but they'd chosen their narrative and they were sticking to it.

The company, The Blades Of Consechra, weren't exactly _malicious_. Dipper had heard the name once or twice before, in the budding demon-hunting circles that popped up post-Transcendence, and while they weren't the best, they'd been clearly working on building themselves a reputation -- if anything, the thirst for fame seemed to be their greatest flaw. So far, their crusade against the Beast of the Unknown just sounded like their latest attempt to put themselves on the map.

They had probably chosen the wrong demon for that.

Dipper had never actually put much consideration into the idea that Wirt could, in theory, leave the Unknown. Apparently Wirt hadn't considered it much either, once he'd ended up as its Keeper. The Blades had, though, and they'd hatched a plan from it.

There weren't many records suggesting how the Beast might be summoned, but that hadn't stopped them from trying. Somehow, through trial and error and no small amount of research, they'd figured it out, and worse yet, they'd gone through with it. Whatever plan the Blades worked out had also involved setting up a chain of wards around the Unknown to keep the Keeper out, much to the dismay of local forest rangers and town and park services. Nobody had gotten around to taking them down, though, and the Blades weren't making it easy.

There was still one bright spot amid all the mess, though: whatever they did, it hadn't worked well. The slayers had been insisting that today would be the day they vanquished the Beast once and for all, but it was past noon, and they had so far failed to deliver. Something about them seemed tense and off, and Dipper, reading between the lines and into the margins well beyond where the average mortal could follow, had gleaned that _something_ had gone unexpectedly wrong during the binding part of the summoning ( _what a surprise_ , he thought dryly), and Wirt had bolted off into the night. 

(Judging by the number of slayers out and about less-than-subtly searching around the woods, they'd lost track of the Dark Lantern as well. Jason didn't know that part, though, and Dipper decided he probably didn't need to.)

The harder part wouldn't be finding him, Dipper surmised. Wirt didn't have much power outside the Unknown, that much was clear, and Dipper's abilities made a simple search-and-rescue mission downright trivial.

No, the harder part would be getting him back _in_. Still not too much trouble, if it all went well, but they'd had to get past a company of demon slayers dead set on putting on a show -- a show where they won. Well-intentioned mortals made everything hairier, though Dipper was beginning to have doubts as to how well-intentioned these particular mortals actually were.

Dipper couldn't say if the wards the Blades set up around the woods would actually _work_ against the Keeper, but if he was really so weak outside the Unknown, they might. And if he had to get past all those slayers, first, well. He might have had a human side to help him, but Dipper wasn't sure he liked those chances. It didn't matter much whether the wards could keep him out, if they slowed him down and left him a sitting duck in the middle of a holy water-fight.

Dipper fidgeted. The bag of candy wouldn't anchor him for much longer -- he'd been charitable as it was, with the fifteen minutes or so it had taken to get the necessary information out on the table, but he had declined to mention that so far. The man was trying; Dipper couldn't exactly fault him for that, but he couldn't stay here on a single bag of Warther's forever.

“Okay, so. I guess the real question is, what are you willing to offer me for helping you? Not that this isn't something I care about, but I don't just do deals for free. A bag of candy's only going to buy you so much time, and a demon's gotta ë̷ͤ͜a̶̸͡t, you know?” 

Jason shivered. Okay, so maybe he didn't need to scare to the man quite that much, even if it was a little fun. 

“No, really, what can you offer me?” Dipper asked again, dropping the eldritch echoes this time. “I can try to give you an aligned-with-my-interests discount, but I definitely still need a price. Unless you want me to make the starting offer?”

As if startled back into motion, Jason sat a little straighter. “I h-have ideas, b-but I'm-- I can listen to the s-starting offer, first.”

Dipper sat back, reclining in midair. “All right then. Uh, let's see. The house? Probably too much, honestly, I mean, childhood home and all. It's not like this whole request is _that_ spectacular-- maybe something smaller. No, definitely something smaller. Sentimental. A trinket...” He surveyed the piles of junk surrounding them both, and found himself honing in on a particular box. “Hey, what's this?”

The box in question had the weight of decades on it, dusty and faded, with an illegible label Dipper didn't need to read to guess at. There was something with emotional weight in there -- whether it was Jason's, or someone else's, he couldn't tell yet, but it would be potent, definitely.

“Th-that's actually what I was thinking of,” Jason told him, looking a little surprised. He made a move towards the box, but Dipper opened it first, flipping through the contents for the source of the sentiment. “W-wait, you don't have to--” The first few layers were just books, mostly unimportant, but there was an envelope of letters shoved down the side, bent under several more packages and a bundle of dried-out flowers.

Dipper pulled out the envelope to examine it. The paper and contents dated back years, and carried the energy of teenage crushes and heartache so potent he could taste it. He flicked the envelope open and pulled out the first piece of paper of several inside. The folded outside of the page read, “For Sara.”

He raised an eyebrow at Jason. “Highschool crush?”

“Uh, y-yeah,” Jason admitted, a little sheepish. “I never worked up the nerve, to send th-those letters, but I used to wish I had.” He laughed, weakly. “You know, Wirt had a crush on her, too. He recorded a cassette tape for her as a gift, a-actually. I don't _have_ it, though. I think Sara took it with her when she moved.”

“Do you know what was on the tape?” asked Dipper. He could include a little gossip as part of payment, if it was good enough.

“He sounded really e-embarassed about it, I remember. Something about poems he wrote for her? And clarinet. He used to play clarinet in the high school band.” Jason looked thoughtful. “It was kind of sweet. We were young back then, you know?”

“That is sweet,” said Dipper, already picturing a young and branchler-less Wirt playing clarinet in front of a tape recorder in all his awkward glory, “and I'm definitely going to let Mabel tease him about it once this is over. Do you think you could get me a copy?” 

“I could ask Sara if she still h-has it. She might.” Jason tilted his hands a partial shrug.

“Good enough.” Dipper grinned, and offered a handshake of blue fire. “You've got a deal.”

“Definitely j-just for the letters and the tape? Not, um, the house or my soul or anything, r-right?”

Dipper laughed. “God, no. I don't know what I'd do with an entire second house.” After a few seconds, he added, more seriously, “Also Wirt would probably be annoyed if I ate your soul, so that would be bad.”

That seemed enough for Jason. “... O-okay, then.”

He took a deep breath, nodded, and took Dipper's hand.

“Deal.”

  
  


###

  
  


Henry did not jump out of his seat when Dipper poofed into existence over the side table with a gleam of urgency in his eye. Far weirder and more unexpected things happened around the shack every week. What was more surprising, though, was that instead of flopping down on the couch in air-puck mode again, Dipper dropped to stand on the table like a general ready to marshal his troops and said, “Hey, guys, we've got a situation.”

“What kind of situation?” asked Mabel, with an edge Henry could only describe as eager. “Is it another cult?”

Dipper winced. “Uh, no, not exactly. It's the Keeper.”

“The who?”

Mabel's mouth made a little 'o'. “Did something happen with him?” She wrinkled her nose. “Wait, did someone in the Unknown summon you? Is that even possible?”

“Yes and no.” Dipper glanced around, and pulled down the window blinds. Henry wasn't actually sure if it was for any practical reason, or just dramatic effect. It could still be serious either way. “I just made a deal with one Jason Frog-dude, and now, I have a rescue mission to do. Do either of you plan on coming? Since I can't exactly be in two places at once.” He paused a moment. “Well, not _consistently_ , anyway.”

“Okay, slow down, both of you. Who are we rescuing?” Henry asked, a little wary.

Dipper smiled far too wide. “A̶̚ d̸̤e̺̒́m̲ͫ͝o̳ͦ͠n!”

Ah. And there it was.

One of the consequences of having a demon for a brother-in-law: you will never have a peaceful, quiet weekend, ever again.

(For all that Henry preferred his peace and quiet, though, he wouldn't have it any other way.)

  
  


###

  
  


It took nearly thirty minutes to assemble a proper plan -- another thirty minutes they couldn't really afford, in Dipper's eyes.

Wirt was in trouble, and the clock had been ticking for hours. The Unknown would defend itself to some extent, he was sure, like a loyal dog guarding the house from burglars, but it was an indiscriminate thing, and all the more fallible without a Keeper. In the meantime, he still didn't know where the lantern was, or how soon the Blades would find it. 

The plan answered the Blades' actions as simply and effectively as they could on short notice. Henry, with Jason as a guide, would take some of the safer unholy artifacts Dipper still had on hand and nullify the wards around the forest. Meanwhile, he and Mabel would go find Wirt, and with any luck, his lantern. Once the Keeper and Dark Lantern were reunited, it would just be a matter of escorting him back to the woods without anyone getting waylaid or exorcised.

For the trip, Henry took a hatchet, and a flare gun to send a distress signal in case a summoning wasn't possible. It was an emergency flare, the type carried by campers and hikers, and hopefully it wouldn't raise the slayers' suspicions if they got caught. Not much use from inside the Unknown proper, but worth having on hand (and while the forest rarely saw actual hikers, the cover story was still something.)

Mabel had already collected a steel crowbar painted high-visibility banana yellow and packed her mask, the latter recently re-bedazzled with lime green and fuchsia rhinestones. Cult-bashing gear, really, but it wouldn't hurt to be prepared. She'd wanted to bring the nail-studded bat, but they agreed it wasn't worth getting stopped on the streets over such an obvious weapon. The same argument was made about the van, for that matter: too big, too obvious, and not useful enough to be worthwhile, so far.

Dipper, for his part, tightened up his human appearance a bit, retracting his claws and fangs into something duller and rounder, and tucking his wings under his shirt. It took a little concentration to maintain, in the back of his mind, like wearing pants that didn't quite stay up on their own, but he wouldn't have to hold it forever.

Jason clearly didn't know what he was doing, but had insisted on helping however he could. On Dipper advice, he agreed he'd bring a hockey stick and helmet, which was a start, but more importantly, he'd try to stay out of harm's way. Dipper didn't relish trying to deal with the consequences if he didn't.

He wasn't sure how he felt about bringing him along, honestly. It was useful, though, to have someone familiar with the area, and an extra pair of hands on short notice. If it came down to it, Dipper supposed he could poof him away to safety, or whichever group had him could drop him off somewhere before things got ugly. But older humans were so uncomfortably squishy...

His thoughts briefly turned to the Grunkles, and he had to cut himself off before they went anywhere unwanted. No point thinking about stuff like that right now. He wrote up a note to leave on the shop counter for when they got back from their fishing trip that afternoon: not asking for help, yet, but to let them know, in case things went south and they needed backup.

Once the trio had suited up and gathered their gear, it was time to go. 

“How much do you think you need to get us across the country?” Mabel asked. She eyed the refrigerator speculatively.

Dipper shrugged. “I'd say a gallon of rocky road would be nice, but I've actually got a deal running right now, so I don't really need it?” (The Pines household always kept enough ice cream and candy stocked in bulk for minor deals, these days. Alcor could offer one hell of a family discount, but a deal was a deal, and that meant prices to be paid, no matter who shook his hand.) “But if you _want_ to give me free ice cream, I'm totally up for that. It _is_ delicious.”

Mabel snorted and held out her hand. “Save it for later, you greedy goof! C'mon, let's just go!”

“Fine, fine.” Mabel grabbed his left hand, and Henry his right. Dipper shut his eyes for a moment, picturing the town he'd seen once or twice before, and in a twister of space and sparks, they were gone.


	2. There's Problems

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (heads-up for some plant-related body horror in the last few paragraphs. this will be a thing with wirt in general for the next chapter or so, so be warned.)

The town they arrived in was greyer than Mabel remembered. A lot of places looked that way on the surface, to be fair, but whatever was under the surface here had less a small-town charm so much as an unspoken tension. It wasn't right. Even just walking down the main street, the atmosphere smelled off. People hurried down the sidewalk without making eye contact, and children clung to their parents instead of dashing ahead or picking unripe blackberries off the brambles on the wooded side of the road. If she looked closely enough past the thickets and the thinner, more domestic greenery, the glint of something metal jumped out at her, hanging off of the tree trunks in a distant but regular pattern.

She hummed quietly to herself as she stepped over a thick dead branch, fallen onto the sidewalk. The oak tree at the edge of the neighboring yard looked crooked without it. 

As they approached the crunching gravel driveway at the front of Jason's house, the looming forest's edge caught her eye through gaps in the wooden backyard fence. Wirt's friendly presence had vanished, and the trees seemed to cast shadows too long for the near-noon sunlight.

Henry followed her gaze and frowned.

“Yeah, it doesn't normally look like this,” she told him. “Trust me, this is weird. It's way creepier than usual.”

Dipper knocked on the front door of the house, prompting a startled noise from inside, followed by the patter of hurried footsteps and the scrape and thud of what sounded suspiciously like moving furniture. A moment later, Jason opened the door with a pale, startled expression, as well as the bike helmet promised earlier. A slightly battered hockey stick occupied his free hand, and he'd taken the liberty of adding gardening gloves and a pair of knee pads like improvised armor.

“Y-you're uh, back already. Oh. Okay then. That's... right. Teleporting. I forgot for a moment there.” Jason turned a wince into a faint but awkward smile, then straightened up a little and stepped outside, closing the door behind him.

Dipper shrugged. “Don't worry about it. Sometimes we forget too! Like, one time I teleported Henry home for lunchtime and Mabel thought something was wrong because he was home early and speed-baked him a consolation cake. That was hilarious.”

“I mean, only in hindsight,” said Henry.

“It was funny,” Dipper insisted. “The misunderstanding was half the joke! We even wrote 'sorry' on the cake and everything. And it was delicious.”

“Anyway!” Mabel said, steering the conversation back on topic. “To recap: Dipper and I are going to find Wirt, and you guys are going into the woods. Right?”

“It shouldn't be too hard,” explained Dipper, dropping the cake argument as quickly as it had started. “The wards shouldn't have any effect on normal humans, so it's really just the slayers you'll have to worry about. Also, the stuff you'll be using to break the wards -- speaking of which.”

Dipper dropped to stand on the ground as he pulled a pair of trinkets from his suit pockets, bundled loosely in cloth. He held them out for the others to see: one a blackened wrought-iron design of twisting geometric shapes, and the other a plain rusty nail with an aura of unadulterated malice.

“Uh, don't keep those on you for longer than you have to,” Dipper warned. “Even the safer stuff can still be corrupting after a while. It'll lose some potency un-consecrating the wards, but once you're done, you should still probably give them back to me or the Keeper.”

“Right,” said Henry, taking both artifacts and pocketing them, careful to re-wrap the handkerchiefs first. 

Jason had a look like he was having second thoughts about helping, but pulled himself together with a serious nod. He looked a little silly, with his hair squashed under the helmet, but Mabel decided not to say anything.

“It might be possibly to slip in through a smaller gap, but I'd say it's best to have at least a quarter of the outer barrier removed to make sure the Keeper can actually get back in without trouble. And the inner circle will probably need to be removed completely to turn off the barrier effect, unless Wirt is able to undo that himself,” Dipper told them. “Jason, you know the way in without taking the obvious tourist route, right?”

“I've h-had some practice, with the volunteering, yeah. We can reach the border of the forest pretty easily from here,” Jason said, gesturing to a gap in the fence. “It's not too far of a walk, just past the graveyard and across the train tracks, i-if you don't take the official path. I even, uh, know a shortcut to get over there.”

Henry nodded, but a few years together pointed out all the signs of his unease now, even if he tried to hide it. “We'll see you in a few hours, then?”

“That sounds about right.” Dipper nodded. “We won't be able to meet up, most likely, but if you're still on the edges and you need to talk, you can try calling us, I guess?” He frowned, thinking a moment, and looked over at Jason. “Wait, do you have a cellphone?”

“Uh, yeah.” Jason fumbled in his pockets for a moment, before retrieving a clunky clamshell that looked like it had been dropped more times than cleaned. “The fringe areas of the Unknown don't have any c-cell service though, even when you're close enough, so I don't think it'll make a difference. Th-they even tried building a cell tower right next to it, once, but it still didn't work in there at all.”

“Well, not much I can do about that. I mean, if it's important, I could try and make it work, but I can't guarantee what state the phone would be in afterwards, so...” Dipper shrugged. “Let's call it plan B. Or C, maybe. Anyway, hopefully this shouldn't take too long to fix.”

Mabel grinned and elbowed him in the gut. “You're gonna jinx it, bro-bro.”

“See you in a bit, honey.” Henry leaned in for a quick kiss goodbye. When they pulled back, Mabel couldn't miss the worried crease in his brow. Still anxious, huh?

“Don't worry, I'm just kidding about the jinxing. It's all gonna work out fine!” she whispered. “I mean, probably. It has so far!”

“I know,” he said. “But also, have you seen our lives?”

"Yeah, okay, fair point. But even if it does go wrong, we'll make it through this! That's just what we do, y'know?" She squeezed his hand, and planted one last peck on his cheek before she let go, and the two of them split for real. “See you soon.”

Henry managed a smile at that. “Yeah.”

With that, he followed Jason around the side of the house. Mabel watched as the pair of them disappeared through a weed-filled gap in the backyard fence, leaving her and Dipper alone in the driveway. Past Jason's house, the forest loomed in front of them, awaiting the Keeper's return. 

Welp. Time to get down to business.

Dipper stood stock-still for a moment next to her, and his form twisted and blackened into smoke around the edges as his feet left the ground again, relaxing his human disguise a little in favor of concentration. He returned with burning gold in his eyes.

“Alright. I've found him. Let's go.”

  
  


###

  
  


Jason's hands shook, and he gripped the hockey stick a little tighter. The air had turned colder on the far side of the train tracks, and the woods itself whispered something was wrong. He'd been around here before, a couple times, but it had never felt like _this_. Not since...

Since before Wirt and Greg disappeared.

Back in high school, those two had been the biggest news of the town in years. They'd already fallen into the pond the Halloween before, and ended up in the hospital, and they'd acted so _weird_ afterward. When they vanished again without a trace on the same night, exactly one year after the last time, never to be found? People around town had muttered rhymes under their breath and thrown salt over their shoulders, and his parents had enforced a daylight curfew for months afterward, casting suspicious glances at the trees, in fear that whatever took the boys might not be satisfied with just two.

It was strange to look back, knowing the truth, and to think that Greg and Wirt had been so close to town all along. (It was terrifying to think his parents were nearly right.)

It didn't take long before Jason and Henry reached the outer layer of wards. A silvery-bright chain hung between the trees, strung on branches a good ten feet off the ground. The air beneath the chains all but shimmered up close, faintly iridescent, and Jason had no doubt that any demon trying to pass through, at least coming in, would hit a magic barrier like a solid brick wall.

They both stood there for a moment, before Henry, sizing up the whole arrangement, spoke. “These ones don't require the artifacts, I think. They just need to be pulled down.”

“... oh.” Jason adjusted his grip on the stick again, unsure what else to do.

With that, Henry walked over and began climbing the nearest tree with chains on it, shimmying up the trunk with surprising grace for someone of his size and pulling himself into a thick branch. “Keep an eye out, okay? Let me know if you see anyone approaching.”

Henry stood upright on the branch, one arm braced against the trunk, and started on the chain next to him. Jason watched for a moment, listening to the distant clinking of metal above him, then remembered what he was supposed to be doing. Keeping his back to the tree, he held the hockey stick in what he prayed was a ready stance, and scanned the surrounding forest for onlookers.

A squirrel sniffed at a nearby root, and scurried off. The muted jangling of chains continued. Some time later, the sound spiked, and Jason looked up with a jolt to see a length of chain hanging inches over his head.

“Sorry about that,” Henry said. “It was a bit longer than I realized. I'll try to warn you next time.”

He slid down the tree trunk like a fireman on a pole, and made a straight line for an elm a dozen feet away, followed by another line straight up through the branches. Jason shook his head, quietly marveling. He couldn't imagine doing that himself, at his age. Beside him, the section of the barrier between the previous tree and its neighbor fizzled out into nothing, like a trick of the light fading away.

The next twenty minutes or so passed in a quiet rhythm. Henry would pick a tree, climb freakishly fast, unravel the links and knots, and pull it off while Jason stood questionable watch with his hockey stick. When Henry was done, he'd scrape a shallow hole into the ground by the base of each tree to deposit the chain, on basis that they needed to go somewhere, and Jason reasonably pointing out (though Henry had probably already thought of it) that the chains should stay out of sight, in case anyone came by and tried to hang them up again. Jason himself had begun collecting leaves -- never letting go of the hockey stick, but trying to gather small piles to discreetly cover the holes.

Distant singing broke the mutual quiet -- a young man's voice, light and wandering. Jason stiffened, uncertain of how to deal with an actual encounter. He dropped the latest pile of leaves onto the chains, brushing them around a little with one foot in hopes of better disguising Henry's handiwork.

As the singing grew louder, a figure emerged in the distance, walking out of the wood. It occurred to Jason that the clinking of chains had gone silent, and he glanced up to see Henry standing frozen-still on the branch some ten feet above, legs bent as if considering a jump.

The figure drew close enough to identify a shape: short and stout, and carrying something heavy. Jason could begin to hear the faint words of the song.

_Travelin' to the edges of the wood  
Gonna beat some bad guys real good  
Chase em out of here, la la la la la la  
I will have no feeeaar, la la la la laaa..._

Something seemed vaguely familiar. Deja vu? He couldn't say.

At the last moment, a brief flash of panic seized at him. He ducked behind the tree, the need for stealth and the desire to hyperventilate waging war in his chest.

The faint crackling of leaves that alerted him to the stranger's steps stopping, and the urge to exhale in relief joined the battle for control of his lungs. After a moment, Jason heard the stranger walk off, a short distance to the right. He considered moving, but decided to stay still -- maybe then, he wouldn't be noticed. 

That hope was dashed by the unmistakeable sounds of the stranger scaling a neighboring tree.

Up. Further up. He could just about see Henry above, flat against the tree and unmoving. Too late. Chains clattered and clicked together in the other tree, then dropped to the ground with an unceremonious _pomf_.

“Hello there!” said the stranger, who Jason could now see waving in his peripheral vision. “You're getting rid of these, too?”

Henry shifted in the tree. “Yes.”

“Okay!” the stranger replied. “I'll deal with the birch there--” (the word was punctuated with the thunk of an axe burying itself in wood), “--and, uh. You can take that one I guess. Oh, also hi there person behind the tree!”

Jason flinched, as much at the stranger's acknowledgment as at several newer sounds from farther off: a sudden thump, like something airborne hitting the ground with unexpected weight, followed by heavy breathing and footsteps, and a feminine voice. “Really, Greg, I didn't actually mean-”

Jason gave up on hiding and stepped out from behind the tree just in time to see a red haired young woman shaking a few stray feathers off her skirts as she came to a stop. She stood there, eyes darting around for a moment before finally snapping into focus on Jason.

“Frog man?” she asked.

“Beatrice?” he replied, a little surprised. He hadn't thought they were already in the Unknown. Didn't it take longer, usually, to travel through?

“I know it hasn't been long, but I feel like you've gotten older,” Beatrice remarked, sharp as ever. “Maybe slower, too. Were you trying to hide from Greg?”

“I wasn't- don't you run on different time in here?” he protested. “Y-you know, years outside, months inside? Like The Tiger, the Warlock, and the Coat Closet?”

It took a long moment to register the implications of her question. Then it hit him -- the stranger was Greg, of all people, just all grown up. Still musical as ever, too. 

“Ohhhh, Jason Funderberker!” Greg said, clearly having a moment of his own. “Yeah.” He looked at Jason and murmured something quieter and unintelligible. 

“Is- is frog me still around?” Jason asked, trying to keep his voice down. He wasn't sure what else to say, but he still remembered Greg carrying around a pet frog by his name, in that last year before he'd disappeared again.

“Oh, nah, he passed on last year. He's probably reincarnated as a salamander now.” Greg tossed another length of chain to the ground and hopped down. “I miss him, but maybe I'll find him in the pond again next spring,” he whispered. “Say, it sounded like you had a chain hole, didn't you?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Jason, glancing back at his pitiful attempts at camouflage with the leaves. “It's o-over there. We were a-adding new ones as we went along.”

“Cool beans,” Greg said, curling the chain into several loops and dropping it into the pile. He dashed off, and returned with an armful of rustling leaves which he promptly dropped on the chains at his feet. “There we go." 

Jason watched how he spread the leaves over the hole, and tried to crouch down and imitate him. A centipede skittered across his hand, and he jerked back with a strangled yelp to shake it off. Beatrice stifled a laugh somewhere behind him as she shimmied her way up yet another tree a dozen yards away.

The woods was huge, but they must have cleared at least a decent portion of the wards by now, Jason thought, squinting into the distance to check for the gleam of metal on the trees behind. He couldn't see where they had started anymore. Despite the unchanged air of the woods, it felt like progress, emboldening him ever so slightly.

Twelve trees later, they heard the party of slayers approach.

  
  


###

  
  


Wirt was not having a good day. 

The secluded alleyway was concrete and brick, no soil of the earth, with only a few paltry weeds clawing their way out of the cracks and surrounding a drainpipe, contrasting a short row of spindly potted flowers on someone's second floor window sill. Their leaves hung like lolling tongues, soaking up what they could of the meager March sunlight. He couldn't ask them for much in this state, exhausted and locked out of his own domain, but he could call on them to be his sentries, feeling out the shifts in the air and earth and murmuring to each others' roots.

He pressed his knees closer to his chin and shivered, trying to think. He was summoned, outside, and his attempt to return to the forest hit some barrier that set his wooden flesh afire like kindling, a pain only smothered by shedding the outer layers of bark and leaving it to turn itself to ash on the ground.

He'd fled. With so little power, and hunted, it only took a split second to run him out of options, disoriented and panicking like a wild animal -- a deer beset by hunters. He'd been lucky the trees outside would even take him. The bindings that tried to trap him there at the border hurt to cross, but whoever had summoned him hadn't expected him to cross them at all. 

They were looking for him, though. He was sure of it.

For all that he'd grown up in it, the town around him was so familiar and foreign at the same time, and he didn't know what to make of it. Somehow, he'd imagined that his newer origins provided him some immunity to the changing times, but clearly the twentieth century was farther in the past than he realized. 

How strange the streets had grown to him, in what felt like so short a time. Some days his upbringing outside felt like a lifetime ago, and yet sometimes he still woke up wondering why it wasn't spring.

In the cold and muddled period he spent curled against the wall, he pondered if the Beast had felt this way, once, or ever. Had he, too, left a life as a mortal to wander the wood? Had he been so alienated, so quickly, by the ceaseless aimless change of the Unknown's busy inhabitants, still trapped in the past like time capsules and yet constantly growing all at once?

The world greyed in and out, indistinctly. The roots tried to support him, but anchored him in the same breath, and whispered not to stand.

Footsteps echoed down the streets, faintly, with an aura that disturbed the roots growing beneath the stone. Something powerful, more than he'd ever been, and enough to make the tiny flame burning in his lantern shiver like a candle in the wind.

Voices reached him as if through a thick, watery filter. This, he thought, was something he knew. The voices, too, but from somewhere else.

“Why would he even hide here?” A higher voice, feminine. Bright, but hushed now, a sparkler fizzled down to nothing but smoke. “It's all stone and bricks.”

“There's a park past that building, and stuff growing out of the sidewalk. He's not quite there, but he's nearby. I can feel him.” The second voice, lower by a fraction but different in cadence, more even in tone. The source of the aura, a blue star's inferno behind smooth, dark walls, all business now.

Dipper. (No, Alcor, like this.) And Mabel. They were here. In town.

Despite himself, Wirt curled closer against the brick wall at his back, trying to retreat behind the broad metal shape of the dumpster. He needed to rest, to recover -- no, he needed to go back, and the _forest_ \-- it _needed_ him. He couldn't be seen here, not by anyone else. Alcor and Mabel would find him. He had to trust that.

It felt like hours. It felt like seconds. Time had no meaning in his hazy awareness, but soon a shadow covered the weeds, outlining a human form over the cracks in the pavement. The voices, the footsteps, the aura, had all drawn near and clustered around him.

“Hey, Wirt,” Mabel whispered, if unvoiced shouting could be called that. Wirt worked to pull his face from the crook of his arm to look up at her. The green regrowing tips of his antlers brushed painfully against the bricks behind him as he moved, and he flinched, curling into himself more again.

Mabel continued, largely unfazed, but with a more considerate low whisper. “We're here to rescue you!”

  
  


###

  
  


"Name yourselves!" demanded one of the slayers, standing beside a tall, dark-haired man who must have been the group's leader. Greg couldn't tell if he was second in command, or just loud and proactive, but he already didn't like him. Greg looked up, kicking the most recent pile of chain into a hollow between the roots of a tree with nearly cartoonish nonchalance. Jason ducked behind him with a few uncertain steps.

“Harry Oak,” Henry replied, quickly. “My friends and I here are hikers. Is something the matter?”

The lead slayer stared back, nonplussed. While the others in the group wore black jackets, with silver badges too small to guess the details of at a distance, the leader's outfit looked like a cheap imitation of a park ranger's uniform, like he'd tried to disguise himself as one for credibility (albeit still with the same metal badge.) From Greg's few and brief encounters with the official forest management, he'd mostly missed the mark, but someone less knowledgeable might have been convinced. 

“Hiking? In period costume?” the man asked, after a moment.

Greg glanced back at Beatrice. Her sour expression said she wasn't moving without a fight, but dressing like she'd walked straight out of a history textbook wasn't making it any easier to avoid that in the first place. Not that she could help it. Maybe they should have planned this part better, after all.

“My, um, sister really likes historical dresses,” Greg volunteered, adding a put-upon shrug for good measure. “We tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted she can hike in it just fine. I don't really get how, though.”

A third slayer turned to the other two, and nodded grimly. Greg strained to hear what he said next.

"The Beast is still afield. Best to get them out of the woods, for their safety."

The leader answered with something softer and indistinct. Jason started inching back towards the tree behind him and Greg, in a nervous sort of shuffle that tried to be discreet and only succeeded by the others not paying attention.

"I can't believe he bought that," Beatrice whispered, leaning in closer while the group was too distracted to notice. "Do we want to just keep going with this until they leave, or try and make a r--?"

Before she could finish, the slayers seemed to come to a consensus, breaking up their huddle. The leader turned to the three of them. "It's not yet safe here. You all need to leave. We'll escort you home."

Henry shook his head. “I think we'll be fine on our own, actually. We've got whistles and flares if we need them, but we're really just following along by the footpath here.”

“It's not safe here,” the leader repeated. “You must understand. There are demons about. The exorcism is close to complete, but until then, we can't risk hikers and civilians wandering off and into this forest's depths.”

Well, that would be more of a problem.

"Oh, I think I'm perfectly safe, thank you very much," Beatrice muttered, bunching up her skirt in her tightening fists as menace glimmered in her eyes. She turned her attention to the leader, her voice clear and level. "Listen, I know you're from out of town, but we know our way around this place. We weren't in any danger before, and we aren't in any danger now.”

"Ma'am, you do not understand what you are dealing with. There are forces in these woods darker than you can know," the leader warned.

"No, I really think I do." Beatrice took a step forward, full of tightly restrained fury. Greg winced, and readied himself to start running. “It's clear you amateurs don't know what you're talking about, if you think that the Keeper poses any harm to _us_. But you... _gentlemen_ \-- " she twitched here, forcing out the word like it left a foul taste in her mouth-- "would be safest to leave us be."

The lead hunter stared at her for a long, quiet moment, then sighed. “Ah. I see how it is,” he said, suddenly a little louder, as if acting on a stage. “You've been enthralled."

“What,” Jason croaked from behind Greg's shoulder.

“We should have expected that the Beast would ensnare the denizens of the wood in this way. Why else would they remain, in such a place?” The hunter's eyes were distant, as though observing a revelation only he could see, and if the slayers behind him were surprised, they weren't showing it. “Yes. I apologize, then.

“This is for your own good.”

  
  


###

  
  


"Can you stand?" Mabel asked. Dipper -- well, probably more Alcor at the moment, but it was just Mabel and Wirt in the alley, so there wasn't much difference -- stepped forward.

Wirt twitched a little, seeming trying to push himself up, but the gesture didn't quite finish before his legs gave under his weight like blades of grass. His face pulled into a grimace. He got as far as sitting a little straighter before going limp again, heavy breaths huffing from his chest into the cold morning air, the fingers on his free hand curled like claws on the pavement while the other clutched a guttering lantern (well, at least that solved _one_ problem) to his chest. The shadow in his form had drained, leaving not much more than a boy behind. If not for the antlers and the unearthly glow behind his eyelids, Dipper almost could have mistaken him for human. 

... Well, a dead human, anyway.

Dipper crouched in front of him, trying to meet his gaze. Wirt's skin was paler than he remembered, washed-out and drowned in its pallor. Wirt still didn't speak, but his eyes opened a crack, enough to slide over the scene and register Dipper's presence before they closed again, and he faintly shook his head.

It took Dipper a few seconds longer to see why.

“Wirt? What's-?” Mabel stopped short as her eyes traveled down to the green in the concrete gaps. Thin stems and vines twisted up from the stone and earth, running along Wirt's arms and under his clothes, meeting seamlessly where veins should be like intravenous lines. They tensed and thickened under force as she moved his arm, refusing to release, rooting him to the alley. Mabel gave the vines an experimental tug, and Wirt hissed, his eyes scrunching shut.

“Well,” said Dipper. “Crap.”


	3. And They Don't Stop Coming

“Go! Now!”

Beatrice spun to elbow the nearest slayer in the face as she stomped hard on the toes of the one already grabbing her. Their improvised little group was already outnumbered by the Blades, and even if they got the upper hand, she could only assume backup would follow.

She may not have had the whole story, but it was obvious this group was bad news. Any demon-slayers foolish enough to tangle with the Keeper of the Unknown, whether they were misguided would-be heroes or shameless seekers of fame, were already pointing their holy weapons in the wrong direction.

It really wasn't the Keeper that was dangerous.

The grab had turned into a wrestling match, and Beatrice knew she was playing with risky odds, but there wasn't exactly an advantage to cooperating. Another slayer reeled from a well-placed steel-toed kick (her sisters laughed at her sometimes, but even they appreciated the value of sturdy shoes), and she twisted to shove the one grabbing her into a tree and push off, forcing his knuckles hard against the bark. She just had to get free long enough to change back, and she'd be in the air, out of their reach.

Greg was holding his own quite well, keeping the nearest few idiots at a distance with his axe. He wouldn't attack any of them in earnest, she suspected, but the sharp edge and weight could intimidate on their own, and an aversion to actual maiming didn't put broken bones completely out of the picture. The blunt side of the axe still served as a decent weapon, and no weapon could ever really be called harmless.

Jason had taken her warning, hurrying on to the next tree as quick as his old legs would carry him. The other man, whose actual name she hadn't caught, followed suit as his guard. If they could get out quickly enough, she could lead them along a shortcut, and they could keep dismantling the wards elsewhere on the borders for a while longer before anyone caught up.

(That strategy wouldn't last long, though. They needed to take down at least half the circle, apparently, and there was a second ring to deal with deeper in before Wirt could re-enter. Too many things to fix and so little time. These idiots were digging their own graves.)

One last solid kick to someone's precious jewels bought her time to dart away, using an old stump to reach a branch above and swing herself up and out of reach, skirt flying up as she hugged close to the trunk and scrambled up into the leaves. Beatrice shut her eyes -- this was always the hardest part -- forced herself upright to stand tightrope-balanced on the branch, and jumped.

The solidity of climbing vanished beneath her in an instant as the world turned into a whirl of falling motion. She reached out her wings, already able to feel the wind ruffling her wing-feathers, let the air catch her, and flew.

Her eyes opened to a blur, color smearing with speed as she arced back up toward the leaves. The situation was far easier to survey from above, unfettered -- Greg had managed to push back the remaining slayers hounding him, and though the four of them were clearly outnumbered, the stranger had done well in fending off those trying to follow, using a hatchet to decent effect along with simple grappling.

Beatrice flew in a little closer, careful to keep out of the fray. (One of the downsides of a fragile bluebird form.)

Greg grinned at her as she passed, and hit one last slayer over the head with the flat of the axe blade. The slayer dropped like a sack of flour, faceplanting into the duff, but as Greg pulled a few steps back, Beatrice could see him panting with exertion. 

The leader was still standing several trees away, yelling something furious and indistinct. The movement was so clearly telegraphed there was no mistaking it, yet Beatrice could only watch as he pulled out an orange whistle and blew. 

The shrill intensity of the sound nearly startled her out of the air, even with warning. 

Reinforcements. These lot were scouts, most likely, just spreading out their eyes to pin down the Keeper and trap him, and were only armed enough to stall for time. Beatrice hated to admit it, but they couldn't handle reinforcements -- not when she'd already been pressed enough to make a break for it, and Jason looked to be dead weight either way, fight or flight. 

If this was the search party, she didn't want to tangle with the welcome wagon. Not here, and not now.

“Hey,” she shouted as she swooped by Greg's head, “go with Jason! If I don't follow, regroup at the mill, got it?!”

Greg flashed a thumbs-up, already moving. Jason and the stranger had shaken off the last of their pursuers, and were already making decent time down a narrow brush-covered trail. It seemed Jason knew enough to find his way to around most basic landmarks at the wood's edge, these days, so for all his age and nervous demeanor she trusted him to manage it.

Or she would have, in any other time.

Perhaps it would be better to stick together for now, with the woods in such disorder. She could already see roots of edelwoods by the path that had grown thicker since the night before. On the other hand, that left the scouting party's leader to deal with.

Beatrice considered her options for a very brief fraction of a second, and then chose.

“Oi, nitwit!” she squawked, swinging around toward the lead scout, who had stopped following in favor of blowing the whistle again. The sound grated at her ears. She channeled the irritation into her transformation, feeling the rush of increasing momentum as her human form returned.

The man's expression was priceless, as he looked up just in time to catch her boots between his eyes. He didn't even get the chance to balance himself, instead toppling like a surprised piece of timber, landing solidly on his back in the roots of a towering elm. Beatrice didn't stick around, hopping off to turn back and fly off into the trees, but the revenge filled her with a childish satisfaction. 

Also, it stopped that godawful whistle.

A few moments, and she had caught up to keep pace alongside the others, flying around head-height. The stranger seemed hardly surprised by Beatrice's bluebird form -- or at least, if he _was_ surprised, he didn't comment.

The four of them carried on down the path in a breathless sort of silence, full of sweat and nerves. Neither Jason nor the stranger had quite the energy to speak first, and nobody else cared enough to answer. Greg hummed a jaunty tune to himself, under his breath, but said nothing yet aloud, perhaps for some concept of stealth.

To her dismay, the scenery began to shift and rearrange as they traveled. The sturdy oaks and elms had become more nondescript, transitioning into a blend of edelwoods and something deciduous and withered she couldn't quite place, and the end of the path seemed hazy and uncertain. 

Beatrice remembered a time, once, when she had been far less confident to wander the woods beyond her home. She did not often like to recall it. The Unknown had been a far darker place then, and even that place had been kept by a caretaker of sorts, however malevolent. She had never seen the woods untamed, but had little faith it would be any kinder than the Beast's version of it. 

_We're trying to help you_ , she thought to the trees, like this might make them understand. The ghoulish faces in the edelwood trunks did not reply, which was probably for the best.

At some point, Greg stopped for a moment, falling behind. Beatrice perched on a thin branch above as he turned around to squint at the path behind them. Beatrice couldn't make out the far end of it anymore, through the trees. No whistle sounded. Nothing followed them. Ahead, Jason and the stranger stopped as well. 

“Is something there?” the stranger asked him. Beatrice was beginning to regret not asking the man's name. It was getting tedious to call him “the stranger” every time he did something.

Greg shook his head. “I think we're good for now.” He came back to the group, leading the way now, humming again.

“Is this about Wirt?” she asked in an undertone, flying close for some semblance of discretion.

The humming died down, half-hearted from the start. “Yeah,” he said, softly. “I know he's out there, but--”

Beatrice watched him bite back a sad sort of laugh. She could nearly hear Jason and the stranger behind them, trying not to act too interested.

“I guess it's kinda funny, that I still can't rescue him. Even though I'm bigger now, and he's a demon and he isn't supposed to need rescuing. He's out there somewhere, and I'm just still running around in the woods like a lost kid again.”

For a few seconds, she said nothing. Greg's gaze stayed fixed on the path ahead as they continued onward through the trees.

She was never very good at comforting people, but she couldn't just let this slide by either. What kind of friend would she be, to leave him unanswered?

"Hey," she began, forcing the uncertainty out of her voice. "He's going to be fine. We're already taking down the wards, aren't we? He's probably just waiting outside for us to finish up, so he can get in, and then-- bam! Problem solved. They surprised us last time, but that trick they pulled won't work twice."

Beatrice turned her head to get another look at Jason and the stranger, following behind them. He looked familiar, even if she'd never seen him in her life. "And if I'm right, we're not exactly in this alone."

Greg nodded, with a faint smile. "Yeah, I know." He shook his head, perking up a little, and the melancholy moment dissolved like ripples in a pond. "Anyway!"

He turned around, walking backwards to face the rest of the group. "It's been a while since anyone came here, so we should probably catch up! Tall dude, I don't think I got your name earlier? Or, I think the name you said was fake, but I could be wrong I guess." Greg looked thoughtful for a second. "Unless-- is it actually Harry?"

"It's Henry," the man supplied. At least he wasn't 'the stranger' anymore. "Henry, uh, Corduroy."

Ah. So that explained it.

"Mabel's boyfriend?" Beatrice asked. Not that she needed the confirmation -- what were the odds of any other absurdly tall bespectacled redheads who just happened to be on their side, least of all any she wasn't related to? -- but more out of simple, mindless surprise.

"Fiancee, actually," Henry corrected. “We're holding the wedding this summer.”

"Aww, man, and nobody told us?" Greg said, and Beatrice could pick out the genuine disappointment behind his tone. She scoffed, ignoring a little ache in her chest. She had long since gotten used to the rules of the Unknown. Those like herself and Greg, those who called the Unknown home, weren't meant to leave it any more than its Keeper was; less, even. Time could only be denied for so long, outside, and home did not always mean kind or free.

"It's not like we'll be able to attend, anyway," Beatrice pointed out. "Not unless they hold it on the borders of the woods, and I don't think there's any buildings still standing that can host a wedding out there."

"Mabel's got most of the plans," Henry admitted, shrugging. The shy gesture, like his glasses, felt out-of-place on someone his size. "I honestly didn't actually know about..." -- he gestured to the woods, and to Greg and Beatrice -- "this, at the time."

“I guess we don't meet up that often on your side, with the time stuff.” Greg shrugged, already moving on. “Anyway, congratulations! A friend of Mabel's is a friend of mine. I have a few ideas for a wedding gift, but with all this pickle going, they might have to wait.”

“Um, it's fine,” Henry declined. “Let's deal with this first, and maybe we can talk about that later.”

“Got it.” Greg spun on his heel to face the right way around again, and took a decisive step forward. “Onward we go!”

  
  


###

  
  


A few nudges and one very uncomfortable demon later, it was clear Wirt wasn't moving any time soon. The roots weren't especially strong themselves, but Wirt's pained expression told Mabel it would be a bad plan to just rip him out of the ground.

“So, is he just...” Mabel looked around for a word. “... Recharging? Or something?”

“Looks like it,” Dipper said, still staring intently at the vines.

Wirt, after a moment's delay, nodded. His eyes stayed shut. Mabel hoped that meant he was resting.

“Hey, Wirt?” she asked, softening her voice as she leaned in towards him. “How soon do you think you can move?”

Wirt mumbled something unintelligible and turned his head in her direction, eyes still shut. She waited patiently for a moment more, but when no response came, she turned to Dipper to see if his magic knowledge powers had anything to offer.

Dipper shrugged. “I'm not sure. I can't imagine this happens a lot to begin with.” 

Mabel watched the flame of the lantern flare ever so slightly as Wirt's hands tightened around it. The roots seemed to pulse in time with the light, if she looked closely enough.

At least he had the lantern. That solved a lot of problems, right there.

“Maybe a few hours?” Dipper offered, after a moment of further thought. “Unless we can find some way to speed things up.” The air was quiet except for the sounds of the town carrying on around them, and the ragged breaths between. 

The next several minutes passed in an uneasy quiet as they brainstormed solutions. After a few seconds, Dipper let his eyes unfocus into something golden and inhuman again for a long moment before returning to normal. He frowned for a split second before returning his attention to Wirt, who had barely moved, looking half-asleep on the pavement.

“It looks like Henry and the others ran into a little trouble at the border,” he reported. “I can't really see into the Unknown itself, but there are more scouting parties near the woods, now, so I'm assuming they left an impression. Guess we'll want to be careful on the way in.”

Mabel worried at the hem of her sweater as she watched the pulsing veins that clung to Wirt's skin. What did they connect to, anyway? She couldn't see anything but scraggly moss and weeds in the cracks of the pavement they grew from, though greenery was definitely thicker around his form than any other patch of ground. 

Idly, she followed the thin trails of climbing vines with her eyes, tracking up the brick wall behind him. Moss intersected the path in springy patches along a line of thready stems that wandered all the way up to a window box of flowers, high enough on the wall that Mabel had to step back and crane her neck to see it.

She looked back down at Wirt again, and was all at once reminded of a scene from a hospital drama she had once wrangled Dipper into watching with her, years ago, where Buff McHunk smuggled his secret criminal lover out of the hospital by carrying them off out the window -- bed, IV stand and all. It was all super cheesy, and obviously she and Dipper weren't the protagonists of an emergency room soap opera, but the _concept_...

“Hey, Dipper?” she asked.

He hummed a reply, eyes still distant for a second before he looked up at her.

“I have an idea.” Mabel stood and surveyed the alley again, just to check that nobody was watching. The line of flowers on the window box caught the sunlight like a tiny row of solar panels, and she could swear they twitched in time with Wirt's breathing. “But I think we're going to need a few things to make it work.”

  
  


###

  
  


The path through the woods didn't lead directly to the far side, of course. The Unknown was funny like that -- it always liked to wander. It was the same when Greg and Wirt got lost as kids.

Greg stepped over an especially large vine snaking out onto the path, making a little game out of it, like skipping over sidewalk cracks. Sidewalk cracks weren't sticky with oil, and they didn't move or try to ensnare your legs if you stood on them for too long, but it had been a while since he last walked on an actual sidewalk, anyway. Maybe modern sidewalks moved now. Weren't there books about that? And those moving sidewalks at airports? Greg hadn't ever been to an airport before, but he remembered something about that, he was pretty sure.

He hummed another half-remembered tune to himself, hopping over another root almost as thick as the trunk it supported. This path was definitely more overgrown than usual. 

It was because Wirt was gone, he knew. The Keeper was supposed to take care of the forest and keep it in check. Otherwise, it was a hungry thing, always wanting more souls. Wirt confided in him some nights about it, all the whispering roots and pollen in the air, begging to spread and grow and reach and consume. The anchors of those trees ran deeper into the soil than anyone could dig, linking together like telephone wires to talk to each other. 

All tangled together below, the Edelwoods were the biggest living thing in the entire forest.

Greg wished, maybe a little unfairly, that Mabel and Alcor would hurry up.

  
  


###

  
  


After a time, the path led them by the edge of the old grist mill where Beatrice's family still lived. One of her little sisters waved from the porch, kicking her bare feet against the front step, and the friendly old dog barked a hello. Greg waved back, and so did Henry. Henry seemed a nice enough man, and the fact Mabel apparently liked him made him already as good as a friend.

Something moved behind a window, and a moment later, Beatrice's mother hurried out of the house, dusting a bit of flour from her apron. “Have you dealt with it, then? The trouble with those men, and your brother?” she called from the porch.

“Some of it!” Greg replied, smiling at her. “We've got help now, and a plan! There were some guys trying to give us trouble, so we're going around to work on the other side for now. They know enough about the woods not to follow us in, so I think we lost them.”

Her mother looked worried at that, but Beatrice interrupted before Greg could try reassuring her. “We'll be fine, Mother. There were only a few men out there, and they were barely armed. For all I know, we didn't even need to run. They were just more trouble than it was worth.”

“I'm glad you're well, but I wouldn't trust that they can't travel the woods, dear.” Beatrice's mother wrung her hands together, glancing at the woods like someone might jump out of the bushes at any moment. “They've already been here, earlier today.”

… what?

“They were searching for the lantern,” she continued, lowering her voice. “We told them we didn't know anything. They left, and we haven't seen them since, but I can't say if the woods finally caught them, or if they found a path back out again. Either way, it's worrisome.”

“You're all right, though?” Beatrice asked, and though she still held herself with confidence, Greg could hear the nerves in her voice. “They didn't threaten you, did they? Because if they did, I'll-”

Her mother shook her head. “Not us, no. But they weren't pleased to leave empty-handed either. The man leading them sounded about ready to light the whole wood on fire, if it meant defeating the Beast.” She frowned, adding a little more quietly, “There's a sort of fury to him I wouldn't like to test. A temper like that rarely bodes well.”

A breeze set the leaves around the mill shivering, a warning whisper in the quiet. 

“Charming,” remarked Beatrice, to nobody in particular. Nobody replied. “Well, we need to get this over with quickly, then,” she added, standing up a little straighter and taking a sharp, deep breath. She narrowed her eyes at the horizon for a moment, thinking.

“Should we s-split up?” Jason asked from the back. He waved. “Also, hello, Beatrice's mother. Nice to meet you.”

Beatrice's mother waved back.

Beatrice scowled. “You know, normally, I would say splitting up sounds like it's going to get us killed, but we _really_ do need to cover more ground. It might be worth it this time.”

She was probably right, if Greg was being honest -- which he was. He and Wirt had made it on their own for a solid week back when they first got lost on Halloween, and that was with the Beast still around. The woods didn't need to be hasty to ensnare people. (That probably should not have been as comforting as it was.)

“A vote?” Henry suggested. “All in favor?”

By unanimous decision, they agreed to split.

“We'll go in pairs,” Beatrice decided. “We should have one person who knows their way around in each group. I mean, not that it'll make a big difference if the woods actually wants us lost, but I'm not going to just leave the two of you--” (she gestured to Jason and Henry) “--wandering around alone.”

“Alcor lent us a pair of unholy artifacts for nullifying the inner wards,” Henry said, reaching for his pocket. “Whoever goes to deal with those should carry one.”

Jason raised his hands, open-palmed. “I, uh, can go on the border team.” 

“That leaves one of you two.” Henry pulled out a bundle of cloth the size of a handkerchief, with a prong of twisted black metal poking out from the end. Something about it made Greg's hair stand on end. 

It felt like the air when Wirt got angry.

“I'll go,” Beatrice volunteered, taking it before Greg could react. She tucked the trinket into some invisible fold in her skirts, probably one of her secret coin pockets.

The pairs split without further argument, aside from Beatrice's mother insisting they take some food for the road. Greg guessed it was the only way she felt she could help, when she was leaving them to wander off into the woods against threats unknown. He couldn't blame her. He knew that feeling, too, of facing something so far out of his league it seemed like there was nothing he could do about it that mattered. Wasn't that what this whole mission was, in a way?

Beatrice and Henry took a narrow footpath off the main trail which Beatrice swore she knew, and left Greg and Jason on the main trail, heading out into the brighter edge of the woods. Greg took a deep breath, and shook his head and wiggled his hands for a moment to chase off the strange sad mood that had begun to overshadow him.

“I guess it's just be the two of us, huh, Jason Funderberker?” Greg chuckled and tried to playfully elbow Jason in the ribs, but Jason was kind of old, and Greg didn't want to hurt him, so he stopped just shy of actually doing that. “Just like old times.”

“We never ac- actually hung out together,” Jason protested. “I barely even hung out with Wirt.”

“Just like new times, then,” Greg said. He settled for patting Jason on the back instead of elbowing him. “C'mon, not-so-Froggy Jason. We've got my brother to save!”

  
  


###

  
  


Samuel Vaughn did not consider himself a patient man. 

He was an organizer and an action-taker, at heart, perfectly suited to the task of leader, if he did say so himself (and he did.) He made goals, and he worked to achieve them, and if he had to personally push and shove and show up uninvited to do it, then so be it. Just so long as things got done.

And if there was one thing he was going to do, it was to put himself on the map. His organization, however small, was the first stepping stone to something greater, and this challenge was the very first step. Earning a name for himself meant putting on a show, and Samuel and his guild were more than prepared to deliver.

Or they _would have been_ , if the whole thing had actually gone to plan. But as the saying went, no plan survived contact with the enemy.

That, of course, was what backup plans were for. This wouldn't be hard to salvage. Some of the cameras were still intact, even. The fact the demon itself had escaped during what, once adjusted for circumstance, should have been only a _moderately_ difficult exorcism, was ultimately nothing more than a delay in the production process. All he needed was the lantern.

“Vaughn? Sir?” His assistant, Katherine, looked up from her phone screen, tapping out correspondence to one of the scouting parties. “To be clear, you were definitely joking about trying to burn the woods down, right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Samuel said. “It's too big to burn, anyway. And the damn things'd probably just grow back.”

She nodded and carried on typing, seemingly satisfied.

Samuel studied the picture on his phone again. The artist's rendering was imperfect, he imagined, and so was the photograph he had taken of it for reference, but the concept wasn't difficult to imagine. In his hands, all he would have to do was open that little metal door, and he would be able to snuff out that burning, writhing spirit inside it with no more than a careless breath. No more cursed forests, no more lost travelers, no more children who never came home -- he would vanquish the Beast of the Unknown for all to see, and no childlike disguises or long cons or time-tangled thralls would deny him that.

All the best demon slayers had blood on their hands. It only mattered what kind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what's a canon timeline... we just don't know...


	4. These Woods Are Lovely, Dark and Deep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and here's where the violence tag comes in
> 
> (it's not anything super wild but there is some blood, so)

The footpath Beatrice led Henry along was about the width of a shoebox, and wobbled and wound through the underbrush like a drunken creek as it led deeper and deeper into the woods. Wherever they had split off from the better maintained “main” trail, he couldn't see it anymore. This path had nothing but dense gnarls of branches overhead, and the ground was occupied by roots as often as it was clear.

Beatrice made no effort to start a conversation, which he appreciated. It would have been incredibly awkward to make small talk in a time and place like this. Or in general, really. But the ominous trees with tortured face-like knots weeping tears of tar were _absolutely_ not helping.

The wards, at least, were pretty obvious when they reached them. Another silvery chain, this one thinner than the last, hung at chest height between the trees like a rope barrier backed by a gossamer-thin shell of an ethereal wall. On one of the trees, a connection point had been hammered home with a bolt of something carved and gleaming, strung with protective trinkets. The bark behind it had blackened as if burnt, twisted around in some fierce battle of forces with an outcome Henry couldn't guess, but the tree still stood undaunted.

With how deep they’d traveled into the woods, it wasn’t clear exactly how or when the slayers had set the whole thing up. On closer inspection, the placement of the bolt did look a little crooked -- a rush job, maybe? Had they put this ring of wards in place _after_ the Keeper was summoned, just banking on containing him long enough to lock him out of his own domain? That was… honestly, not the dumbest idea Henry had ever heard, but Mabel and Dipper usually dealt with cultists, who weren’t known for being bright or competent. 

It wasn’t even clear if they’d had a backup plan. Demon slayers, of all people, should have probably known better. Henry privately lowered his appraisal of the company a few notches.

He took a deep breath, and took the kerchief-bundle of the nail out of his pocket. The menace surrounding it felt stronger, louder, when he uncovered the end to touch it, at arm's length, to the glowing bolt on the tree trunk.

It felt like a sort of reverse-tug-of-war, like pressing to wrong ends of two magnets together. The nail in his hands simply did not want to touch the bolt, and vice versa, but he forced them together nonetheless, touching metal to metal, holy to unholy, spraying out an arc of semi-sanctified sparks as they met.

He pressed on, though, and after a moment, it seemed to weaken. The resistance bled away as the force fizzled out and died. The malevolence of the nail didn't really fade, but the bolt turned dull and plain, whatever magic it carried undone. It fell easily from the tree trunk when he gave it a solid tug, leaving a length of chain snakelike along the ground, the other end connected a dozen yards away to a tree well off the path. 

The section of the barrier behind it seemed to melt away into nothing, like a spiderweb at the wrong angle, but the rest on either side stood shining and strong.

“So, we need to do that with all of them?” Beatrice asked. It was first thing she'd said in about fifteen minutes.

“That's what D- uh, Alcor told us,” he confirmed.

“You don't need to dance around his name, you know,” Beatrice told him. “Already heard it. He wasn't exactly the best secret keeper when we first met. Or, Mabel wasn't, anyway.”

Henry didn't have much to respond with, so he just nodded. “Sure.”

She didn't say anything more, so the two carried on in silence, not uncomfortably. Henry watched a moment as she withdrew the iron-wrought trinket from the folds of her skirt, approaching the next ward and imitating what he'd done, then made his way over to the next tree after. The undergrowth and roots made it difficult to walk outside the confines of the narrow path, and he could see no sign he was following in any human's footsteps, save for maybe Beatrice's. 

The next ward fizzled and crackled like a half-pulled electrical plug as the barrier charm dulled and darkened. He heard the same beside him, and they settled into an unspoken pattern of work.

Henry had found plenty of things about Mabel's life he needed time and effort to adjust to. That her brother was a literal demon had, in hindsight, been more the tip of the iceberg. He hadn't exactly signed up to desecrate holy wards in the middle of an extradimensional forest, but it was increasingly clear that events like this were a part of his normal life now, or they would be soon enough. 

Sometimes it was easier not to think about it, and just get it over with. He didn't exactly _like_ that, but he would live with it, if only for Mabel. (At least nobody had died. Yet.)

It was still a strange feeling, one that gave him a little contemplative pause, to consider that Mabel had still even more parts to her life -- her adult life, at that -- that Henry had never actually been aware of. He only had context to guess why Greg and Beatrice (and presumably, the Keeper) hadn't been mentioned or come to visit before, but it was still an odd feeling. Like finding his parents' old high school photos, except those hadn’t been nearly so surprising and this.

Another ward sputtered out. Henry let the chain fall, and something caught his eye.

He followed it up along the ground to a few yards away, where the glint of metal disappeared under bracken and leaves, and glanced ahead to Beatrice, who was busy with the next charm.

“Excuse me. Ms--?”

“Mill,” she absentmindedly filled in for him. “Call me Beatrice, though, it's less weird that way.”

“Beatrice? We might need to hurry up.”

“I'm already going quickly. Why, is something else wrong? Possibly in some new and exciting way neither of us know how to deal with?” 

He didn't look up, but the volume of her voice and the crunching of dead leaves gave away her approach. She came to a stop beside him, then stepped around, too short to look over his shoulder.

“Oh,” she said, “Damn. I was hoping to use that.”

Before them lay six feet of chain, an unfamiliar stretch of twisted trees, and an expanse of roots and miscellaneous bracken, undisturbed and void of footprints. The sky overhead had darkened, so even the light filtering through the trees dimmed into a suggestion of early twilight. The barrier in that direction disappeared entirely into the scant empty space between the trunks.

Henry couldn't see anything resembling a path, no matter how hard he tried and squinted and stared, as if the ground would simply rearrange itself into a more familiar well-trod pattern of stepped-on moss and broken twigs, but his family had given him at least a passing understanding of how to find tracks on forest ground, and he could only say for certain there were none.

Beatrice took another step forward, crouched, and tugged along the chain until she reached the end of it. The last links disappeared directly into the earth at the foot of another tree, and stuck fast when she tried to dislodge them. 

“Well, not much we can do about that part, all by ourselves.” She sighed. “Looks like we're hedging our bets on your friends and mine getting that idiot back safely _and_ quickly, now.”

With one last futile yank on the chain, she stood, turned on her heel, and headed directly back to where she'd been working.

“You don't seem terribly surprised,” Henry observed, after watching her a moment.

She shrugged, gesturing a little carelessly with the metal trinket as she replied. “The woods likes to get people lost. Honestly, I'm impressed it waited this long to try.” Beatrice paused, and he could see her thinking for a moment. “I bet it's the wards.”

He finished the current charm and followed the chain past her to the next one. “You think the woods are getting stronger without them?”

Beatrice moved to step back from the tree and nearly tripped on a root that gave Henry the sinking sense it hadn't been there before. “It would make as much sense as anything else magic does,” she said. “It's like how the Unknown used to be, back when the Beast was still around. Except worse, which means apparently that monster was still half doing his job, back then. Who would have thought?”

“... the Beast?” Henry asked. “The slayers mentioned that, before, but I'm not entirely up to speed. He was here before the Keeper, though, right?”

“Pretty much? He was the boogeyman of the Unknown. The reason why people who wandered off into the woods didn't come back,” Beatrice said, by way of explanation.

“And the Keeper is the reason they do?”

“Pretty much. The Wirt is his successor, since that good-for-nothing woodpile finally died and left us alone. Turns out it wasn't all him, though -- the trees themselves are just as bad. Half the job is just to keep them under control. He’s basically a magic groundskeeper.” She scoffed. “Not that the Beast cared. He sounded more interested in living forever than anything else.”

Henry found himself caught between wanting to ask more and not wanting to pry too deeply – both for Beatrice's sake, and for his own. Knowledge had its strengths, but there were some things he really didn't need to know. He let the moment pass, and moved on, and tried not to think about the ground beneath his feet.

  
  


###

  
  


Jason shivered.

The far side of the woods looked like late autumn already, the leaves filling the path with a crackling brown carpet where they weren't wet with whatever recent rain must have passed the pair of them by. Greg's commentary proved at least a little soothing -- he noticed that the leaves were still clean and uncrushed, so this path probably hadn't seen traffic in a while.

The trail wound unpredictably through the trees, in broad detours and curves and loops, until the only reason Jason didn't consider himself lost was that Greg seemed to know where he was going, and Jason’s own sense of direction here had never quite existed in the first place. In time, though, the trees began to thin out into something better-kept (if still overgrown) and marginally more familiar.

Jason didn't try to make much further conversation, but Greg would get chatty from time to time, although he whispered more often than he spoke aloud, the farther they traveled along the trail. The topic meandered from the town (still mostly as it was, except for the slayers making everyone nervous) to Greg and Wirt's parents (not much news since they'd left town after the Transcendence, but Greg still had hope of correspondence by post -- Jason didn't quite have the heart to remind him why his letters had gone unanswered) to an entertaining retelling of that fateful Halloween night in the cemetery, which Jason found to be just another blurry memory from highschool, but Greg considered a formative experience, and recalled in vivid detail.

“So anyway, I guess Wirt was embarrassed about the tape because it had 'poetry and clarinet' on it, and he was all nervous that Sara would think he was a nerd. Which he is! But he's a good kind of nerd, so she probably would have liked him.”

Jason laughed weakly. “I can confirm, her partner nowadays is definitely a nerd. I think she likes those. I’m n-not sure if I counted, though.”

“Haha, yeah. I think his poetry is a lot better, now, too. I mean, he doesn't but he sometimes still shares them with us, and--”

Just shy of a bend in the path, Greg froze and gestured for Jason to stop. He tapped his ear and pointed ahead. It took a moment for Jason to work out what he meant, and another spent straining to hear whatever it was Greg had picked up on, before he realized why. 

Squinting, Jason could make out the shapes of strangers through the trees, sporting now-familiar black jackets and badges. Voices filtered through the hushed woods:

“This is so stupid. How would it have even gotten here? We didn't even summon the damn thing on this side of the wood.”

A woman's voice, strong and clear, and not a small degree irritated: “We're searching the area, and that means the whole of it. The demon controls the woods. It's not unreasonable to assume it could have moved its soul-jar around before fleeing.”

A third voice, a little quieter than the other two, joined in offhand. “I mean, if I was him, I'd just put it in the middle of the woods or something. Way harder to find there.”

“Well, that's what the spiral search pattern is for,” the woman answered. “We're searching the perimeter for now, unless we get other leads. If you want to go complain to the boss or Ms. Li, be my guest, but you're not going to get a new answer.”

“I still believe we need to be on watch for sabotage,” a fourth voice added. Jason wondered if he had heard it before. “We saw the thralls about earlier, and they were loyal enough to put up a fight. It could have used them to hide the dark lantern somewhere, or carry it away. There's mythological precedent.”

The quiet one snorted. “There's a mythological precedent to you getting your ass kicked.”

“Thomas, shut it. Regardless, we'll get to the thrall issue if it comes up,” said the woman.

The first voice sighed. “Wish I'd gotten to be on one of the town teams. We're just going to spend all day looking through the damn dirt and they'll probably find the demon himself or something and get all the glory.”

“This isn't merely about glory,” objected the voice he nearly recognized. “This is an act of charity!”

“One that just so happens to bring a great deal of attention to the cause,” pointed out the quiet one.

“Guys?” A new voice interrupted, low and uncertain. “We've got company.”

“Hey!”

Jason's eyes met a stranger's as the leader stared at him directly, though the undergrowth and saplings, as visible to him as he must have been to her. The sound of footsteps followed, quick and many.

Jason was not proud of what came next. 

As the party of slayers spilled in from around the bend in the path, metal glinting off firearms and blades, he found himself paralyzed like a deer in the path of an oncoming train. He could only watch the scene play out, an observer in his own body, unable to interfere.

Greg raised his axe at first, but hesitated at the sight of the glinting pair of pistols holstered at the waist of the lead slayer, a tall blonde woman with a stern-eyed stare. His and Jason's chances were already hampered by being outnumbered again, this time three to one -- or six to one, Jason thought rather miserably, since he couldn't even work up the courage to do anything but stand there.

Six demon-slayers with guns and knives, for two intruders with a single axe and one focused mind between them. The narrow path let two or three stand abreast, but there was nowhere else to go, except back down the path, or into the trees. It wasn't a risk Jason would have taken, himself. 

None of them moved to fight, though, instead gathering behind the invisible line of where their leader had stopped. Greg bit his lip and lowered the axe by a few inches, a frustrated set to his jaw -- unwilling to attack first, and wary of the odds, but equally unprepared to lay down his weapon.

“Those two -- those are the ones from earlier, the thralls,” said a hunter from the back of the group, stepping forward to point at them. Dimly, Jason recognized him as the leader of the previous scout party they'd run into an hour or so ago. A bruise bearing a suspect resemblance to the heel of Beatrice's boot marked the center of his forehead. “The old man, and the one with the axe. The other two must have split off.”

Greg tensed, all but rolling his eyes, but stood his ground, and Jason thought he saw him casting furtive glances into the woods as if already charting a footpath through the brush. “We're not thralls. We live here, and W-- the Keeper is our _friend_ , and would be a lot better if you just gave him back and left us alone!”

“Sounds like what a thrall might say,” commented one of the hunters from the group -- Jason hazarded a guess this was “Thomas”.

“They could know something,” the hunter from before insisted, ignoring them both entirely. “They're familiar with the Beast. Came to try and disrupt the wards. They might even be able to lead us to the lantern, for all we know.”

“We'd get the half the credit for the kill, too,” mused the low-voiced slayer that had spotted them, clearly mulling it over.

“Or maybe _you_ could stop trying to kill him!” Greg didn't seem quite able to contain himself, frustration spilling out into his words and his tightening grip on the axe.

The blonde woman sized up both Jason and Greg for a moment. “Unless you're here to help us finish that damned thing off, we're not interested in negotiating.” She nodded to the hunter from before, and to the others. “Tie them up. If they're this much trouble, we might as well keep them in arm's reach. It's not like magic woods folk will be running for law enforcement, either.”

“Wait, wh-- what?” Jason snapped back into motion as one of the Blades, a short woman with dark hair and a surprisingly strong grip, took him by the arm and shoved his hands behind his back. Another, a tall and imposing man with the buzz-cut and dull expression of a mall security guard, clamped a fist around the handle of Greg's axe. “Y-you can't just-- this, this is--”

“Kidnapping?” the dark-haired one asked. Jason recognized her by voice as the impatient one, who had been complaining earlier. “I mean, 'for your own good' and all, but sure. I'd just call it getting you out of the damn way.”

A howl of pain distracted them both, and Jason jerked sideways to see a scene of chaos break out beside him. Greg had swung, startled or furious or both, and scored a gash along the tall slayer's gut and sunk the axe into his forearm. The first streaks of red already stained the edges of the torn black cloth of the man's jacket. 

Jason almost didn't move at first, but a moment later Greg had drawn back the axe, and, in the shock of the moment, grabbed Jason's other arm. “Come _on!_ ”

The woman's grip on his arm slipped, but tightened a second later, and Jason found himself the sudden subject of a tug-of-war between her and Greg. Greg yanked again, and Jason cried out, half in surprise and half in pain. His old bones weren't meant to take this, not at all; he'd be paying for it too soon.

The narrow path worked in their favor, at least slightly, limiting the number of slayers that could engage them at once. Greg kicked the woman sharply in the knee, and her grip slackened enough as she staggered to release, sending Jason stumbling forward off the path.

“What do we--?” Jason couldn't quite pull together a complete thought, with too many fears to voice. Greg answered by dragging them both several steps into the bracken, shifting his arm around Jason's chest, and hoisting him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry.

The slayers had already moved into furious reaction by the time Greg got to running again, but the terrain tripped them up more than it did Greg, and the trees cut visibility to what little could be seen between them. Jason watched, slung over Greg's shoulder, as the slayers shrank into obscurity amid countless trunks and bushes.

The uneven roots beneath them finally caught Greg as well, a few minutes later, a narrowly averted fall punching the air from Jason's chest before Greg all but dropped him into a sprawling whorl of ferns, panting and shaking. “You're... way heavier... than a frog...” Greg managed, between heavy breaths.

“Y... yeah.” Greg's inane comment almost made sense in the middle of everything else. Or maybe he just didn't care, right now. Jason tried to sit more upright, but his back felt like it had a hot wire run through it from the landing, and his arms protested any effort to push himself up. “Oh, ow...”

“Hah... sorry.” Greg tilted his head toward the ferns. “I was hoping the leaves would help.”

Jason didn't have much to say on that, but grit his teeth and tried to sit up, leaning against the base of a tree behind him. “What do we do now?”

Greg sat against another tree, across from him, and stared at the dirt. “I guess we find somewhere else to start taking down the wards again. Or we come back later, once they've given up.”

“... I guess.” His back complained a little less now that he had stopped trying to stand, but the ache remained. 

Greg had started to look worse for wear, too, since their last encounter on the path. He was good at keeping a cheerful face, but he'd gained a more solemn air now, his endless well of positive energy finally beginning to slip below the brim.

“Do you need a hand up?” Greg asked, after a minute of silence. His voice had gone low and quiet at some point since they'd left the path, but Jason couldn't entirely place when.

“I- I'll be fine,” Jason tried to assure him, but trying to prop himself upright again didn't go any better the second time around, and he wheezed and grimaced, trying to push off the ground onto his knees and elbows. The ground itself seemed to cling to him, like it didn't want him to leave. “Or, uh, not.”

Greg stood, brushing bracken off his pants, and then paused, raising one hand on front of him. Thin strands of wood and root ran along the side of his palm, winding around his arm and trailing like rope down to the forest floor. “Aw, _poop_.”

“Is that...?”

“Edelwood,” Greg confirmed. “Or it will be.” He frowned and used his free hand to pull the root free, leaving a line of sticky black oil behind, and kicked around to shake other roots loose from his legs and boots before stepping over to offer help.

Jason looked down to find still more lines of slender roots criss-crossing his own limbs and chest, like he'd been captured by Lilliputians. Had they really grown so quickly? They had only lingered for... how long had they been in this little spot, actually? 

Greg joined him a moment later to peel the strings of wood from his clothes and hair, pulling him to stand. Third time was the charm, it seemed. He supposed not being tied down by demon trees helped.

“Alright,” Greg said, a determined look in his eye. “So, we'll--”

A click interrupted them both, the sharp, metallic sound at odds with the rustling leaves and brush.

“Neither of you move, understand?”

Greg turned his head, wide-eyed, and Jason slowly followed, both tracing the sound to its source. The lead slayer of the party stood twenty yards away from their little gap in the trees, framed by branches and brambles. In her hands, reflecting scraps of sunlight from above, a gleaming bright pistol sat leveled at them both.

“You've caused us more than enough trouble,” she told them both, in a voice that made it clear she expected no further argument. “Mark here has a bloody arm to patch up now, in the middle of the goddamn woods, and I have a report to make. Come quietly, this time, and _maybe_ I'll feel like being nice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *frantically trying to plug my plot holes with bits of crumpled newspaper* PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS
> 
> also, this is my last buffer chapter, so updates will likely get much slower and more sporadic after this. hopefully you won't be waiting until 2025 though lol

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot believe it has been four entire years since I started writing this damn thing. For what it's worth, ~~I've rewritten the first chapter about four times~~ I have several chapters and a solid outline now! And also Jason Funderberker the Human has somehow become an important recurring character. I, uh. I don't really know how that happened. But I'm running with it.


End file.
